ESSAYS 485 



"air" through the intermediate condensation into "water," just as we regard the 

 condensing of steam and the freezing of water. Prof. Burnett compares this 

 conception of Anaximenes to the modern concepts of the physical states of matter, 

 and regards it as typical of the purely physical conceptions attained by the 

 Milesians. It is possible to pick out statements that imply only physical concepts ; 

 it is equally possible to discover what seems to us an indiscriminate use of the 

 physical and the psychical. Cornford (in his From Religion to Philosophy) is 

 certainly nearer the truth when he describes the Milesian primary material as a 

 subtle, mobile stuff, animate and divine. Anaximander conceived the eternal 

 round of change in three main stages : the elements earth, air, fire and water 

 separated from the primal materies ; then individual things were engendered from 

 them. This process reversed returned all individual existents to the original 

 continuum from which they came. A " mother- stuff " became four "daughter- 

 stuffs" ; four "daughter-stuffs" produced the world of things. "Things," says 

 Anaximander, " give satisfaction to one another for their injustice, as is appointed 

 according to the ordering of time." He seems to regard the combination, 

 say of water and -earth into earth-water compounds, as an encroachment by 

 elements upon one another's domains, like attacks upon their neighbours by 

 plundering ti'ibes : " satisfaction " must be given by the return of the elements 

 to their own private regions. " Satisfaction," " reparation," " injustice " — this is 

 not the language of mechanistic physics. Such rampant psychism in Anaximander 

 is a lucid commentary on the "all things are full of gods" of his contemporary, 

 Thales : Thales' primal " water" was animate and psychic. Both were animists, 

 no doubt, without knowing it — they did not realise any necessity to distinguish 

 the psychic or animate from the physical, or, for that matter, the possibility of 

 making the distinction. The Milesians mingled the psychical and the mechanical 

 together. 



Atoms did not easily escape from this animism in their ancestry. Empedocles 

 still drives his elements by hate and love. When his elements crumble down into 

 the atoms of Democritus their psychism begins to escape, but it does not escape 

 completely. The Greeks remained long in the relaxing grip of primitive animism 

 because they could not rid themselves of the notion that the soul was the principle 

 of movement. Aristotle remarks, in the De Anima, that his predecessors had 

 handed down motion and sensation as " the two characteristics of soul." " De- 

 mocritus," he writes, " whose view agrees with that of Leukippus, consequently 

 maintained soul to be a sort of fire and heat ... he declares that those (atoms) 

 which are spherical in shape constitute fire and soul. . . . The reason why they 

 maintain that the spherical atoms constitute the soul, is that atoms of such con- 

 figuration are best able to penetrate through everything, and to set other things in 

 motion. . . ." Gomperz, in his Greek Thinkers, notes that Democritus made the 

 most mobile atoms the vehicle of psychic functions. The atom has begun to part 

 with its animistic outfit — the least mobile atoms are being prepared for Dalton. 

 But the deep impress stamped into the human mind by that impressive model of 

 reality, the animate or psychic object, is not easily erased. Its close connection 

 with movement kept the psychic anchored in matter. Democritus quite failed to 

 de-animise the most mobile atoms, and thought flowed on to Descartes before the 

 final expulsion of animism from matter. By composing the soul of one set of 

 atoms Democritus preserved in the very heart of the Atomic Theory the confusion 

 between psychical and physical status ; but he made possible the future victory 

 of science in its long wrestle with animism, though he did not himself achieve 

 that victory. Did Dalton realise the continuous mental effort, prolonged through 



